The very best — and very worst — moments of Alex Rodriguez’s career as a Yankee have always felt guided by an author’s hand, the better to ensure maximum drama (or maximum calamity), the better to draw out the spectacle (or the catastrophe).

At his very best — and there are few who ever played the game better than Rodriguez did in 2007 — you would seek out his name in the batting order if the Yankees were behind late, you would calculate in your head how many hitters it would take for him to step into the batter’s box with a chance to turn the scoreboard upside down. And, often as not, he would go Roy Hobbs on you.

At his very worst — and, absent his magnificent run in 2009, that would include many of the postseasons in which he toiled in pinstripes — he would absorb the spotlight like a black hole in space, allowing his teammates to run for cover while he took another one on the chin and another one for the team. And you could see that coming, too.

So it was as Rodriguez walked from the on-deck circle to home plate in the bottom of the first inning Sunday night. The Yankees were already up 1-0, it was already apparent the Red Sox’s alleged ace, Clay Buchholz, had nothing, the bases were loaded, the prime-time television lights were clicked on.

Rodriguez can do that, still, at age 39, after a year in exile, after years of injuries to his body and his reputation, the former a product of Father Time, the latter of steroid self-immolation. We can have the debate another time whether it’s actually a good thing or a bad thing that Rodriguez is the one Yankee capable of making the Stadium sound this way, still. What is inarguable is this:

The Stadium was transfixed.

And it also knew. It KNEW, you understand. Rodriguez had a fine spring training. He’s had a satisfying first week back in pinstripes. Whatever concerns he may have had about how he’d be received by the home folks quickly dissipated, then disappeared; all is mostly forgiven, if not forgotten. Every town has its blind spots. San Francisco has Barry Bonds. St. Louis has Mark McGwire. Boston has Big Papi.

New York, for better or worse, certainly for now, has Alex Rodriguez. He is cheered here, yes, and he is rooted for, but mostly, and most importantly, he is buzzed about.

And so you could certainly tell something was afoot in the bottom of the first. The Yankees have played six games. This was the fifth different spot in the order for A-Rod: seventh, followed by second, then third, then fourth. Now sixth. And of course — of COURSE — batting him sixth brought him to the plate with the bases loaded.

“I’ve been getting good wood on the ball,” he would say. “I’m hoping Joe [Girardi] continues to trust me. One day at a time. For all of us.”

In one of his last public appearances before he was buried by his season-long ban, Sept. 21, 2013, Rodriguez hit a grand slam at Yankee Stadium off a former teammate named George Kontos of the Giants. It was the 24th such time in his career that Rodriguez had swatted the bases clean, and it broke a record that Lou Gehrig had held for 75 years.

He wouldn’t get No. 25 here. But he would jump on the first meatball that Buchholz would zip his way — his eyes big and wide, his stroke looking plenty similar to the one we used to know — and he would crush the ball into the left-center-field gap, far into Death Valley, and 1-0 was now 4-0, on the way to 14-4, and there was no longer anything ambiguous about Rodriguez and his relationship with Yankees fans.

“That’s a huge hit for us, to get us going,” Girardi said.

No Yankees team since 1989 had started a season 1-5 (and that team finished 74-87) and now it was pretty clear this team would avoid that, would head to Baltimore feeling a little better about its 2-4 self.

A-Rod? He leaves the cocoon now, and that’s fine too. The road crowds will be hostile, but they’ve always been hostile, even before Biogenesis, and as his old friend Reggie Jackson once said: “Fans don’t boo nobodies.”

And pitchers don’t fear nobodies. Later in the game, Rodriguez was up with the bases loaded again, and let’s put it this way: It sure looked like Boston lefty Tommy Layne wanted zero part of serving up Slam 25. He walked him on a 3-2 count. A-Rod took his base. Forty-three thousand fans cheered. Yankee Stadium sounded like Yankee Stadium again.